You buy a few thousand acres of land and build a few thousand houses, condos, and apartments. While you’re at it you connect all units together with super high bandwidth fiber-optic lines. And, then you offer an incentive to all web developers, software engineers, educational content authors, scientists, and a boat load of media consumers to move into your high-tech neighborhood and develop software, services, and content to deliver and interact with over your network.

Sweet! You’re network and services exceed EVERYTHING outside of that network, bandwidth and content alike. Now, you decide to start selling that content to people outside of your development. The only way to do this is to tie into someone else’s network… oooo, say AT&T. They’ve got their own little neighborhood, and well, it is kinda sucking compared to yours, but o well, they’ve got millions of suckers paying out the wazoo for inferior service… sorry I digress…

so AT&T and you come to an agreement, if YOU pay AT&T your people can deliver data over their lines… at the same time AT&T’s people are already paying THEM for those very same lines. hmmmm… and YOU are depending on AT&T to upgrade their lines to make it so their customers can become your customers to.

Except, AT&T looks at how much money you are making with your excellent services and say… hey, we can NEVER make that with JUST an infrastructure… you need to pay us a percentage based on types of data. Sounds like a great deal right. No… not really. So, why not just tell AT&T to go >>>> themselves and run a line, or wireless connection straight to your new customers.